Declaring that the novel is dead sometimes feels like a pastime as old as the novel itself. Even men in the nineteenth century would lament how the novel was being ruined because women were now reading it. Since then, as each successive literary generation enters middle age, our society finds the need to reengage in this debate over the medium’s future. Recently, it was Bret Easton Ellis who pronounced (with that enviable self-assurance that only the privileged possess) that “No one really talks about novels anymore” and that no one has written the “Great Millennial Novel” (calm down, we’re still working on it).
Our most reliable contemporary doomsayer, though, is the English novelist Will Self, who every few years types out another Guardian piece about how the novel is really dead this time. In his various articles and his lectures uploaded on YouTube, Self’s argument is consistent: as recently as 1980s, the novel was “the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour” something discussed around water coolers, the “DNA of culture”—but, because of the internet and the digital age, we’ve now entered a post-Gutenberg era and the novel has lost its essential physicality, its fundamental codex form, which means that when the physical book dies, the novel will too.
Now, whether or not the digital age really does means the death of the book itself, Self’s argument still rests on the fundamental misconception of the novel’s physicality. In a lecture at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin entitled “The Last Trump: Fiction in the Age of Uncertainty” Self insists that writers must print out their work and edit by hand because they have to have a sense of the physical type, an analog of the novel that exists in space and time (as opposed to letters on a computer screen, which I guess for Self don’t exist in either space or time). With this argument, Self is trying to expand Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to include the novel as well. In that essay, Benjamin argued that although industrial technology allows works of fine art to be reproduced on a mass scale, an original piece of art still retains an aura that cannot be reproduced—for example, a reproduction of one of Fra Angelico’s frescoes on his Wikipedia page is not the same as seeing it in person in Florence. But while Benjamin may be right when it comes to painting and fine art, novels have never had a physical aura, because unlike a painting, a novel does not exist at only point in time and space. When a novel’s words are written, they are meant to be reproduced, whether by the hand of a medieval monk or in the moveable type of a printing press or on the pixels of a computer screen.
More broadly, we should also question whether it’s even true that we live in a post-Gutenberg era. The invention of the printing press in Europe was a revolution because it allowed the spread of written texts far beyond the capabilities of medieval copyists, leading after a few quick centuries to wide-spread literacy. But what is the internet except the ultimate version of Gutenberg’s printing press, spreading text across the world and allowing anyone anywhere to buy any novel with one click and then read it instantly on a browser or tablet? They may not be bound in codexes, but they’re still novels, and people are still reading them.
Finally, the notion that the novel was ever the “DNA of culture” or the “apogee of creative endeavour” is itself absurd. Certainly this wasn’t the case in the 1980s that Self looks longingly back to, since by then film and television were already dominant mediums. No, what Self is lamenting here is that today it’s harder for him to tell which novels he’s supposed to read, which authors have been designated by the cultural elite as representative of our era. In his Dublin lecture, he mentions Philip Roth, Normal Mailer, Gore Vidal, and William Styron (how completely coincidental that they all happen to be men) as examples from an earlier era when novelists had a large cultural impact–but this cultural impact was likely not nearly as widespread as he imagines. How many people in 1970s knew who Philip Roth was, and was it really more than the number of people today who know who Zadie Smith is? And, of course, does the life of the novel really depend on an author having that level of impact? Today, we may not have a public intellectual like Gore Vidal or a Great American Novelist like Philip Roth (though Jonathan Franzen will continue to try), but in their place we have a hundred Vidals and Roths writing complex novels about our society and culture—and this time not just men but women too.
Ultimately, the truth is that people always think novels are dead when they’ve stopped reading them. In his interview, Bret Easton Ellis revealed that Jay McInerney and Mark Danielewski hadn’t read Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad because “they weren’t really interested.” And in his latest interview in The Guardian, Will Self admits, “I don’t tend to read contemporary fiction much.”